For this event, 12 artists from all over the country will be presenting work that they have been making as part of the Sound Diaries open call.

The presenting artists are:

Richard Bentley, Hannah Dargavel-Leafe, Aisling Davis, Atilio Doreste, Marlo De Lara, Beth Shearsby, Kathryn Tovey, Jacek Smolicki, James Green, Lucia Hinojosa, Sena Karahan, Fi.Ona

Sound Diaries expands awareness of the roles of sound and listening in daily life. The project explores the cultural and communal significance of sounds and forms a research base for projects executed both locally and Internationally, in Beijing, Brussels, Tallinn, Cumbria and rural Oxfordshire.

A conference exploring how we can get people who used to cycle, or have never cycled, onto bikes, and the role of virtual reality cycling.

Come and join us for a day full of informative talks, interactive workshops, cycle tours, an expert panel and demos and rides on ebikes and adapted bikes!

Ticket price includes lunch and refreshments.Who is this event for?

Council officers, elected councillors, transport and environmental campaign groups (local and national), Cyclox members, community organisations interested in transport, active travel and health, local businesses and educational institutions, academic, other professional experts, and interested members of the public (whether you cycle or don’t cycle).

By the end of the conference you will know how to:

> Create an age friendly locality, as a low traffic neighbourhood
> Share best practice case studies of effective interventions for active travel linking soft and hard measures
> Communicate the benefits of eBikes and how they can get people back cycling
> Convey the opportunities virtual reality can play in increasing activity for people who are housebound
> Contribute to the post-conference guide to promoting uptake of cycling

The conference is organised by Cyclox, the cycle campaign for Oxford, and Oxford Brookes University; it follows on from the University’s cycle BOOM research and current Co-CAFE project (www.cycleboom.org , www.co-cafe.org).

Badger expert Tanesha Allen, with some help from local school children, has been studying our badgers to understand more about how smell affects their behaviour. Join Tanesha to learn more about her research and have a go at the ‘smelly shirt test’ to see how you measure up against a badger. She is currently collaborating with the Abingdon Science Partnership and Science Oxford on a badger-based citizen science project being funded by the Royal Society.

The badger is one of the UK’s iconic species and our largest land predator. It is just as common as the fox but much more elusive – we have only ever seen our resident population at Stansfeld Park on camera traps! Badgers live in large family groups and have a highly developed sense of smell. With just a sniff, they can recognise each other as well as knowing the sex, age and social group membership. However, little is known about how they react to the scents of other species – including humans.

Tanesha Allen is a third year PhD student at the University of Oxford. As part of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit’s (WildCRU) ongoing European badger project, her research focuses on olfactory mate choice via specialised glandular secretions and metabolic by-products. She previously studied Animal Sciences at Washington State University (BSc.) and Zoology at the University of Cambridge (MPhil).

Join us for the next event in our Science on Your Doorstep series, where we shine a spotlight on fascinating people living and working in Headington. The event is free to attend, but you are invited to make a donation towards a special fund we’re setting up to support disadvantaged schools across the region. The fund will help these schools with their travel costs, to enable them to come and enjoy the new Science Oxford Centre.

Bernard Tucker Memorial Lecture – Joint with Oxford Ornithological Society

Join Oxford University Press for a special science-themed “speed dating” event. Mingle with a range of topics, including reptiles, psychopathy, environmental law, synaesthesia and circadian rhythms with expert authors from the Very Short Introductions series. Make an impression and get your questions in before the bell rings!

IF Oxford is operating a Pay What You Decide (PWYD) ticketing system. This works by enabling you to pre-book events without paying for a ticket beforehand. Afterwards, you have the opportunity to pay what you decide you want to, or can afford. If you prefer, you can make a donation to IF Oxford when you book. All funds raised go towards next year’s Festival.

Chris Powles will describe the extraordinary behaviour of elephants in Kenya’s Mount Elgon National Park, where they excavate 150m into the mountain to mine for salt.
Almost equally remarkable is the crucial role that Chris and his family have played in ensuring the survival of this unique population.

Blackwell’s is thrilled to be welcoming Erling Kagge to discuss his new book ‘Philosophy for Polar Explorers’.

Synopsis
Erling Kagge was the first man in history to reach all of the Earth’s poles by foot – the North, the South, and the summit of Everest. In ‘Philosophy for Polar Explorers’ he brings together the wisdom and expertise he has gained from the expeditions that have taken him to the limits of the earth, and of human endurance.

This is the essential guide to the art of exploration. In sixteen meditative but practical lessons – from cultivating an optimistic outlook, to getting up at the right time, to learning to find focus and comfort in solitude – Erling Kagge reveals what survival in the most extreme conditions can teach us about how to lead a meaningful life. Wherever we may be headed.

Erling Kagge is a Norwegian explorer who was the first in history to reach the ‘three poles’ – North, South and the summit of Everest. He now lives in Oslo where he runs a publishing house. He is the author of multiple books, including ‘Silence’, which is published in 38 languages, and ‘Walking’.

Tickets for this event are £5. Doors will open at 6.45pm when there will be a small bar available to purchase drinks. For more information, please contact our Customer Service Desk on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk

We are entering the fourth revolution of healthcare.

The first revolution was Public Health with sanitation, cleaner air and better housing. The second is medical healthcare with the advancement of diagnostics and treatment with a focus on disease cure. The third is personalised health, through individual knowledge, technology, behaviour change and precision medicine.

However, these revolutions have left three major problems unresolved; unsustainable healthcare, rising health inequalities and climate change driven by unsustainable living.

So, we enter the fourth revolution in healthcare which builds on the previous three. This is based on communities rather than individuals, supporting a sustainable active lifestyle, eating local produce and using culture, art and contact with nature to create purpose and connections to each other, leading to greater resilience and wellbeing. It is a revolution when Smart Cities become central to the delivery of health and when advanced technology becomes almost invisible encouraging a lifestyle closer rather than further from nature.

In this talk Dr Bird will explain how we are already delivering this future and how biological changes such as chronic inflammation, epigenetics, mitochondrial dysfunction and telomere shortening can provide the scientific link between wellbeing and disease.

Tara Pirie recalls her three years living in a tent, while tracking and gathering data on these elusive, but beautiful big cats. She is now one of the world’s leading experts on Leopard ecology and conservation.

In modern high-tech health care, patients appear to be the stumbling block.

Uninformed, anxious, noncompliant individuals with unhealthy lifestyles who demand treatments advertised by celebrities and insist on unnecessary but expensive diagnostics may eventually turn into plaintiffs. But what about their physicians? About ten years ago, Muir Gray and Gerd Gigerenzer published a book with the subtitle “Envisioning health care 2020”. They listed “seven sins” of health care systems then, one of which was health professionals’ stunning lack of risk literacy. Many were not exactly sure what a false-positive rate was, or what overdiagnosis and survival rates mean, and they were unable to evaluate articles in their own field. As a consequence, the ideals of informed consent and shared decision-making remain a pipedream – both doctors and patients are habitually misled by biased information in health brochures and advertisements. At the same time, the risk literacy problem is one of the few in health care that actually have a known solution. A quick cure is to teach efficient risk communication that fosters transparency as opposed to confusion, both in medical school and in CME. It can be done with 4th graders, so it should work with doctors, too.

Now, in 2020, can every doctor understand health statistics? In this talk, Gerd Gigerenzer will describe the efforts towards this goal, a few successes, but also the steadfast forces that undermine doctors’ ability to understand and act on evidence. Moreover, the last decade has seen two new forces that distract from solving the problem. The first is the promise of digital technology, from diagnostic AI systems to big data analytics, which consumes much of the attention. Digital technology is of little help if doctors do not understand it. Second, our efforts to make patients competent and to encourage them to articulate their values are now in conflict with the new paternalistic view that patients just need to be nudged into better behaviour.

This talk will be followed by a drinks reception, all welcome

Joint event with: The Oxford–Berlin Research Partnership

Organised by Oxford Civic Society @oxcivicsoc. Ellie Mayhew from the Freshwater Habitats Trust will explain why our area has such rich biodiversity and what the charity has been doing to improve and monitor these valuable freshwater areas to protect the species they support.. https://www.oxcivicsoc.org.uk/programme/

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in unprecedented disruptions to urban mobility systems across the globe yet also presented unique opportunities for people to drive less, walk/cycle more and reduce carbon emissions.

Join Professor Tim Schwanen (Director of the Transport Studies Unit and Lead Researcher on the Oxford Martin Programme on Informal Cities), Dr Jennie Middleton (Senior Research Fellow in Mobilities and Human Geography in the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford) and Professor Jim Hall (Professor of Climate and Environmental Risk, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford) as they discuss post-pandemic mobility futures in relation to the re-imagining of transport systems across different geographical scales and contexts.

Supporting local campaigns and campaigners
Tues 15th December
7:30-9:30pm
Duncan Dollimore, Cycling UK’s Head of Campaigns and Advocacy, will steel our resolve for 2021 by showing us how campaigners in Oxfordshire can benefit from Cycling UK’s knowledge and experience. Cycling UK launched the Cycle Advocacy Network in September this year.

The failure to stem the tide of biodiversity loss, or to address the deeply related issue of climate change, demands we quickly find more ambitious and more coherent approaches to tackling these challenges.

Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are one such family of approaches that has recently gained prominence in international policy and business discourse. Broadly defined as actions that involve working with nature to address societal goals, NbS are being widely hailed as a win-win for addressing biodiversity loss and climate change. However, this win-win scenario is not guaranteed.

Some NbS – particularly those involving planting trees in naturally treeless habitats – can have negative outcomes for climate change mitigation, biodiversity and local peoples’ livelihoods. There are also critical questions around the timeframes over which NbS can help tackle the biodiversity and climate crises given the negative impacts of warming on the health of the biosphere.

In the second discussion in the Oxford Net Zero Series, hosted by the Oxford Martin School, Professor Nathalie Seddon, will bring together interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners to explore the value and limits of working with nature to address climate change and why NbS must both support biodiversity and be implemented with, by and for people, if they are to provide benefits over the longterm.

To register and watch this talk live: www.crowdcast.io/e/nature-climate-change

The talk will also be streamed via YouTube here: https://youtu.be/Ka7Sc5d1v3k, but please note you will not be able to take part in the interactive Q&A session unless you join the talk on CrowdCast.